AI

Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab is about to get a lot richer. Business Insider reported on Thursday, November 6, that the AI startup is set to close a $5 billion funding round led by Accel at a $40 billion pre-money valuation, a deal that could close as soon as this week. For Thinking Machines Lab funding, the numbers tell the story: the new price is more than triple the $12 billion valuation the company carried after its $2 billion seed round in July 2025. ...

Anthropic is improving its AI models about twice as fast as it did a year ago, according to an independent review published Thursday. METR, the nonprofit group that evaluates frontier AI systems, spent 11 weeks inside Anthropic’s data and concluded the company is likely advancing on well-specified tasks at around double the pace it managed between March 2024 and October 2025. Its central estimate puts the speedup at 1.9 times the old rate. The researchers said they would “not be surprised” if the real figure landed anywhere from 1.3 to 3 times. ...

Google is going to Wyoming. The company announced Thursday that it will build its first data center in the state, a $17 billion bet on Laramie County that pairs the campus with one of the largest carbon-capture power projects ever tied to a tech company. The Google Wyoming data center will sit near Cheyenne, built with Tallgrass Energy, Black Hills Energy, American Electric Power (AEP) and Related Digital. Google hasn’t said when the campus itself will open, but the power plant behind it has a date: AEP and its partners plan to start construction in 2026 and have it fully running by the end of 2028. ...

Wall Street’s AI trade just had its worst day in more than six years. The Nasdaq 100 fell 6.4% on Thursday, erasing a record $2.3 trillion in market value in a single session as investors dumped chip stocks and AI names after the Democrats’ midterm sweep. It was the tech-heavy index’s worst day since March 16, 2020, at the height of the Covid crash. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 5.5%, the S&P 500 lost 4.4% in its worst session since April 2025, and the Dow fell 3.44%, or 1,833 points. All 30 Dow stocks finished in the red. ...

Anthropic launched Personal Finance in Claude on Thursday, November 5, 2026, a beta that lets paying subscribers in the US link their bank, credit card, loan, and investment accounts to the chatbot and ask it plain-language questions about their own money. The rollout is gradual, so not every eligible account will see it on day one. Claude can read balances, credit limits, and up to 24 months of transactions across as many as 16 banks. It can tell you where the money went last month and flag recurring charges. What it cannot do is move any of it. ...

OpenAI released its most capable hacking model yet on Thursday, and almost nobody is allowed to use it. GPT-6 Cyber, a cyber-specialized version of GPT-6 Astra, scored 48.5% on the company’s ExploitGym benchmark, a test that asks a model to turn a known flaw into a working exploit against a remote target. That’s up from 32.1% for the previous model, GPT-5.6 Cyber, and 42.4% for Astra itself. OpenAI rates the new model “Critical” for cybersecurity, the top tier of its Preparedness Framework, and it is handing it out only to a select group of vetted customers. ...

Meta has acquired Conductor, an AI coding startup that lets developers run several coding agents at once in separate workspaces. Axios first reported the deal on Wednesday, November 4, and Meta confirmed it to TechCrunch the same day. Financial terms were not disclosed. Nobody has said what Meta paid. But the deal says a lot about where the coding-agent race is headed. Conductor’s cloud service shuts down on November 20, just 16 days after the announcement, and the company will start deleting users’ cloud data after that. Its team is moving to Meta’s Superintelligence Labs. ...

Micron’s stock crashed 11% on Thursday, November 5, after Bloomberg reported the memory chipmaker has largely stopped building a $4.5 billion plant in Taiwan. Shares traded at $708.64 in late morning, down from Wednesday’s close of $795.23. The drop capped a brutal week for the stock. Micron fell 7% on Wednesday, and Thursday’s slide pushed it roughly 42% below its record close of $1,213.56 on June 25. It also slipped below its 200-day moving average. ...

Apple quietly cut the daily amount some of its engineers can spend on AI tools from $300 to $200 last month, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, and deeper cuts are on the table. The caps cover tokens, the units of text and data that AI models chew through with every request, behind tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, which Apple staff use for coding and other work. For the richest company on earth, $100 a day per engineer is pocket change. That’s exactly why the cut is worth paying attention to. ...

OpenAI’s security team set its AI loose on the Linux kernel and came back with a number that sounds made up: 948. In a single 10-day run in mid-October 2026, an autonomous pipeline built on an upcoming cyber model found, reproduced and exploited 948 distinct local privilege-escalation vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, bugs that let an ordinary user account take over a machine as root. OpenAI published the results Wednesday, November 4, in a research post titled “A thousand fewer paths to root.” The whole run cost $1,213,430 in API credits, or about $1,279 per working exploit. ...

OpenAI is buying the company behind the code storage already running inside its coding agent. The OpenAI Pierre acquisition, announced Wednesday, November 4, 2026, will bring Pierre Computer Company and its Code Storage product into Codex, OpenAI’s AI coding tool. Financial terms were not disclosed. Axios first reported the deal, and OpenAI confirmed it the same day. Pierre’s technology is not new to Codex: its Trees and Diffs libraries already handle file browsing and change review inside the app. What changes now is ownership. Instead of licensing a piece of infrastructure, OpenAI will own it and build Code Storage directly into Codex. ...

Fal just raised $1.3 billion, and the number that matters most is not the check size. It’s the speed of the repricing: the San Francisco startup is now valued at $16 billion, double the $8 billion valuation it carried in April 2026. For Fal AI inference, that jump says where investors think AI money is moving next, from building models to running them at scale. Fal announced the round on Tuesday, November 3, alongside a completed Series E. Bessemer Venture Partners led the new Series F, with Nvidia, Sound Ventures, HOF Capital and T. Rowe Price also taking part. Bloomberg reported the $16 billion valuation, and TechCrunch confirmed the round’s size and lead investor. Fal described Nvidia as a strategic investor, which matters when the biggest bottleneck in this business is access to chips and computing capacity. ...

Apple just handed every iPhone developer the keys to its rebuilt assistant. On Tuesday, November 3, Apple opened a Siri AI Developer Preview in the iOS 27.3, iPadOS 27.3, macOS 27.3 and visionOS 27.3 betas, letting any app bring its content and actions directly into Siri AI. For Apple Siri AI developers, that’s the moment a feature first promised in 2024 stops being a demo and starts being something they can actually build with. ...

Meta is going back to the bond market for as much as $25 billion. The Meta $25 billion bond sale, reported Tuesday by CNBC and first flagged by Bloomberg, would help pay for the data centers, chips, and AI models behind chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s push toward personal superintelligence. About two-thirds of the debt is expected to be denominated in U.S. dollars and the rest in euros, according to people familiar with the plans who spoke to both outlets on condition of anonymity because the details are private. Final pricing was expected Tuesday afternoon. Meta declined to comment. ...

Goldman Sachs has taken advanced AI coding tools away from most of its bankers and traders. Under internal guidance updated in October and reported by Bloomberg on November 2, Anthropic’s Claude Code and Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot are now limited to the bank’s roughly 12,000 engineers, out of a workforce of about 47,000. Don’t mistake this for a firm turning its back on AI. Goldman still runs its own AI assistant for every employee, and it still uses Claude heavily behind the scenes. What changed is who gets to hand a coding agent a task and let it run. ...

Google told schools on November 3, 2026, that a full ban on its AI tools comes with a price: students lose Google Search, too. Gemini, Gemini Notebook, Gemini in Classroom and Google Search will be entirely off for K-12 student accounts until administrators explicitly turn them on. Google announced the change Tuesday alongside Guided Learning, now available worldwide in Classroom, with a Search pilot later this month. The catch, reported by The New York Times, is what happens when a district says no altogether. Chris Phillips, Google’s vice president and general manager for education, told the Times that “Search and AI are deeply integrated,” and that students at those schools “will not have access to search, and they’ll see a message from their school that indicates it’s not available.” ...

The New York Times sued Brave on Monday, November 2, 2026, and the target wasn’t a chatbot maker. It was the browser company whose search index quietly feeds them. Filed in federal court in Manhattan, the suit accuses Brave Software of scraping the Times’s copyrighted journalism, building it into a web index of more than 30 billion pages, and selling AI companies paid access to that content. Hours later, the publishers of the Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, and the Orlando Sentinel filed a second, similar suit. Together, the cases open a new front in the publishing industry’s fight with AI: not the models that answer questions, but the middlemen that supply the raw material. ...

Anthropic told investors on November 2, 2026, that AI may soon start improving itself faster than the company’s own safety work can keep up. The warning sits in the Risk Factors section of its amended S-1/A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the document the Claude maker filed as it moves toward a public listing. TechCrunch first flagged the new language on Monday, and WCCFTech confirmed the same filing language in its own report. ...

OpenAI and Anthropic have each set up a dedicated election war room ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, putting staff on watch for misuse of their AI platforms in the final hours before Americans vote on November 3, 2026. Semafor reported on Monday that this is the first time either company has deployed such a unit, and Nextgov/FCW confirmed the moves the same day, citing exclusive reporting from Politico and Semafor. ...

Oracle filed on Monday, November 2, 2026, to raise $20 billion from investors to fund its AI data center buildout, splitting the raise evenly between a $10 billion sale of new stock and a $10 billion sale of bonds. Shares fell nearly 6% in Monday trading, Reuters reported, extending a slide of roughly 33% for the year through Friday, October 30. It’s a lot of money to ask for at once, and the market’s answer was blunt. Investors have spent months questioning whether Oracle’s AI spending can pay off fast enough to justify the borrowing behind it, and a $20 billion raise does not settle that question. It sharpens it. ...